eCaring Forumhttps://ecaring.com
Making home health care better with timely information on aging and elder care. Wed, 20 Feb 2019 16:07:07 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.25ecaringhttps://feedburner.google.comSubscribe with My Yahoo!Subscribe with NewsGatorSubscribe with My AOLSubscribe with BloglinesSubscribe with NetvibesSubscribe with GoogleSubscribe with PageflakesSubscribe with PlusmoSubscribe with The Free DictionarySubscribe with Bitty BrowserSubscribe with Live.comSubscribe with Excite MIXSubscribe with WebwagSubscribe with Podcast ReadySubscribe with WikioSubscribe with Daily RotationYou're great! Thanks for subscribing! We will deliver the best information on aging & elder care straight to you!Letter Submitted to the NY Times Editorial Pagehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ecaring/~3/-j7yN__XXn8/
https://ecaring.com/letter-submitted-to-the-ny-times-editorial-page/#commentsWed, 20 Feb 2019 16:05:25 +0000https://ecaring.com/?p=4553To the editor: Your editorial (How Much Will Americans Sacrifice for Good Health Care, Feb. 16) echoes a systemic flaw baked into our health insurance and provider systems, which is particularly invidious in public health insurance. High costs and lower quality can’t just be fixed by a single payer negotiating lower drug prices, nor would […]

Your editorial (How Much Will Americans Sacrifice for Good Health Care, Feb. 16) echoes a systemic flaw baked into our health insurance and provider systems, which is particularly invidious in public health insurance. High costs and lower quality can’t just be fixed by a single payer negotiating lower drug prices, nor would providing fewer services mean better care at lower costs. The core problem is exemplified by the arbitrary split between Medicaid and Medicare, with each providing different services spread out among many providers.

The major fix to cure our health system doesn’t lie in the false dichotomy between public and private insurance, nor does it require one payer as a response. It lies with creating single entity accountability for the total care of the individual. Whether that’s Medicare, a form of Medicaid, or private insurance, unless a single entity oversees the care of a person across the so-called care continuum – home, office, hospital, facility – and the levels of reimbursement and pay are adjusted by the quality of care and outcomes of that person, the systemic problem of high costs with poor outcomes, and lack of access, will remain in place.

In particular, enormous strides and cost savings while improving quality can be obtained by more inclusion of information from and services in the home, where people spend the bulk of their time and where many health problems originate. Discerning these problems in a timely fashion can prevent deterioration, provide lower cost treatment options, and enable people to remain where they most want to be. But the orientation of hospitals and providers has been to ignore the home in favor of the more costly options of hospital, emergency rooms, and nursing homes. Study after study indicates the enormous costs from poor coordination among many providers; a single entity tasked with managing the entire care of the individual, including their home, is the best solution to getting universal coverage at an affordable price.

Sincerely

Robert M. Herzog

The writer is CEO of eCaring, a healthcare management company that provides resources to manage care in the home.

]]>https://ecaring.com/letter-submitted-to-the-ny-times-editorial-page/feed/0https://ecaring.com/letter-submitted-to-the-ny-times-editorial-page/Brazilian Company mavie Selects eCaring as Platform to Manage Patients with Rare Diseases, Over 13 Million People Could Benefit.http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ecaring/~3/DlCFg7BOdPY/
https://ecaring.com/brazilian-company-mavie-selects-ecaring-as-platform-to-manage-patients-with-rare-diseases-over-13-million-people-could-benefit/#commentsWed, 14 Nov 2018 17:04:03 +0000http://ecaring.com/?p=4544Brazilian-based “mavie” announced today it has selected eCaring as the platform it will use to manage the treatment of people with rare diseases in Brazil. There are over 13 million people suffering from rare diseases in Brazil. mavie will provide its care management solution to government sponsored associations which oversee the treatment and care of […]

]]>Brazilian-based “mavie” announced today it has selected eCaring as the platform it will use to manage the treatment of people with rare diseases in Brazil. There are over 13 million people suffering from rare diseases in Brazil. mavie will provide its care management solution to government sponsored associations which oversee the treatment and care of patients with rare diseases in the country.

“mavie is French for “my life” reflecting our initiative to furnish caregivers and family members with technology that provides doctors and specialists access to critical and vital statistics in a dynamic, real-time and actionable format,” said Guilherme Gorzoni, CEO of mavie.” He added, “After extensive review, we selected eCaring as the best system available to manage patients with complex, varied problems and requirements. Its ease of use and the rapid, simple ability to customize it for a wide variety of conditions makes it the ideal system to improve the quality of care and lower the treatment costs for the over 13 million people suffering from a broad variety of rare diseases in Brazil.”

“We’re proud that mavie had selected eCaring as the core system to track, monitor and manage the conditions and needs of patients with rare diseases,” said Robert M. Herzog, CEO of eCaring. “This selection further validates that our unique system, using the icon-based language we created, is applicable to a broad variety of patient populations and needs. Its ease of configurability and decision-support algorithms makes it the best choice for managing numerous patient populations with varied data requirements, whether for rare diseases in Brazil or for Value-Based Programs in the U.S.”

mavie is currently transforming the eCaring system, which already has a Portuguese version along with many other languages, for use in the Brazilian healthcare system, working with associations and pharmaceutical companies to provide the low-cost app for use by millions of patients.

]]>https://ecaring.com/brazilian-company-mavie-selects-ecaring-as-platform-to-manage-patients-with-rare-diseases-over-13-million-people-could-benefit/feed/0https://ecaring.com/brazilian-company-mavie-selects-ecaring-as-platform-to-manage-patients-with-rare-diseases-over-13-million-people-could-benefit/Register for [Webinar]: Technology in Caregivinghttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ecaring/~3/1UgnQ9BI7zc/
https://ecaring.com/register-for-webinar-technology-in-caregiving/#commentsWed, 09 May 2018 14:48:16 +0000http://ecaring.com/?p=4537CLICK HERE TO REGISTER! Title: Technology in Caregiving Topics to include: · New technologies that enable home care by connecting caregivers, providers and families· How sensors, cameras, computers and programs in the home deliver real-time information to the palm of your hand· The integration of telemedicine into home care· Start-ups that are revolutionizing financial protection and […]

· New technologies that enable home care by connecting caregivers, providers and families· How sensors, cameras, computers and programs in the home deliver real-time information to the palm of your hand· The integration of telemedicine into home care· Start-ups that are revolutionizing financial protection and home security

]]>https://ecaring.com/register-for-webinar-technology-in-caregiving/feed/0https://ecaring.com/register-for-webinar-technology-in-caregiving/Register for [Webinar]: The Next Frontier in Healthcarehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ecaring/~3/nrBlFXgBMls/
https://ecaring.com/register-for-webinar-the-next-frontier-in-healthcare/#commentsTue, 18 Oct 2016 18:19:45 +0000http://ecaring.com/?p=4471CLICK HERE TO REGISTER! Title: The Next Frontier in Healthcare Description: This webinar will provide insights on the causes of the value challenge we have in the US healthcare system – the drivers of high costs and lower than expected outcomes – and offer a path toward transforming this dynamic through the collection of real-time, […]

Description: This webinar will provide insights on the causes of the value challenge we have in the US healthcare system – the drivers of high costs and lower than expected outcomes – and offer a path toward transforming this dynamic through the collection of real-time, actionable data from the home.

]]>https://ecaring.com/register-for-webinar-the-next-frontier-in-healthcare/feed/0https://ecaring.com/register-for-webinar-the-next-frontier-in-healthcare/Partnership Fund for New York City and New York eHealth Collaborative Announce Companies Selected for the 2016 Digital Health Accelerator Programhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ecaring/~3/Bd9BoK7YifA/
https://ecaring.com/partnership-fund-for-new-york-city-and-new-york-ehealth-collaborative-announce-companies-selected-for-the-2016-digital-health-accelerator-program/#commentsTue, 13 Sep 2016 16:00:17 +0000http://ecaring.com/?p=4449Six digital health companies have been selected for this year’s New York Digital Health Accelerator (NYDHA), a four-month program run by the Partnership Fund for New York City(Partnership Fund) and the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC). The 2016 NYDHA Class includes BMIQ, Diameter Health, eCaring, Healthify, Somatix, and Spring. The NYDHA supports growth-stage digital health companies […]

]]>Six digital health companies have been selected for this year’s New York Digital Health Accelerator (NYDHA), a four-month program run by the Partnership Fund for New York City(Partnership Fund) and the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC). The 2016 NYDHA Class includes BMIQ, Diameter Health, eCaring, Healthify, Somatix, and Spring. The NYDHA supports growth-stage digital health companies in developing their products and technology. The companies were nominated and then selected to be part of the 2016 Class through a rigorous process by top industry healthcare providers and payers.

]]>https://ecaring.com/partnership-fund-for-new-york-city-and-new-york-ehealth-collaborative-announce-companies-selected-for-the-2016-digital-health-accelerator-program/feed/0https://ecaring.com/partnership-fund-for-new-york-city-and-new-york-ehealth-collaborative-announce-companies-selected-for-the-2016-digital-health-accelerator-program/Kaiser Health News Highlights Need for Better Care Transitions that eCaring can Providehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ecaring/~3/x_tuSWFQRZ4/
https://ecaring.com/kaiser-health-news-highlights-need-for-better-care-transitions-that-ecaring-can-provide/#commentsTue, 06 Sep 2016 21:24:48 +0000http://ecaring.com/?p=4440SAN DIEGO — Alton Rodgers had just come in from gardening when he suddenly blacked out and collapsed on the floor. The 89-year-old Kentucky native spent about 10 days at Palomar Hospital, where doctors told him a build-up of fluid around his heart was the culprit. Now, shortly after being released, Rodgers got a knock at […]

]]>SAN DIEGO — Alton Rodgers had just come in from gardening when he suddenly blacked out and collapsed on the floor. The 89-year-old Kentucky native spent about 10 days at Palomar Hospital, where doctors told him a build-up of fluid around his heart was the culprit.

Now, shortly after being released, Rodgers got a knock at the door.

Nurse Tiffanie Abrajano and social worker Valerie Ellis were there to make sure his transition home had gone smoothly. They checked his medications one by one and made sure he knew how to take them. They walked through the house looking for loose rugs and other obstacles that could cause him to fall again. They also asked about safety bars in the bathrooms, and whether he needed a caregiver to help with bathing and dressing.

“We are trying to see if there is anything you might need here in your home to potentially keep you from going to the hospital,” Ellis said. “Do you feel like you have enough assistance?”

This KHN story also ran in USA Today. It can be republished for free (details).“I think I do,” said Rodgers, who lives with a friend. “I feel much stronger… And if I need any help, I can get it.”

For elderly patients like Rodgers, leaving the hospital is fraught with risk. Most are sent home or to nursing facilities after just a few days, still reeling from acute illnesses — not to mention the chronic conditions they are also confronting.

“Just because they have had four days in a hospital doesn’t mean they are better,” said Mary Naylor, a gerontology professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.

It’s during that critical time when problems can occur. Patients may get sicker because they don’t have access to medications, transportation, food or crucial equipment such as oxygen tanks. And many don’t have relatives or caregivers to help with the daily tasks that they were able to perform unassisted before being hospitalized.

“There are gaps in care, there are gaps in communication, there are gaps in adequate preparation for patients and families,” said Naylor, who designed a transitions model to address these problems.

In recent years, federal health officials have begun penalizing hospitals for high rates of readmission and sponsoring pilot projects — like the one that sent a social worker and nurse to see Rodgers — to help ensure smoother discharges.

Hospitals and community groups are experimenting with different methods to improve the transition of elderly patients from the hospital.­

Nurse Tiffanie Abrajano checks Alton Rodgers’ medications so he knows how to take them after being released from the hospital. (Heidi de Marco/KHN)

Some of them seek to strengthen communication with primary care doctors, or use technology to track patients across different health systems. Others emphasize closer partnerships between hospitals and community groups that provide meal delivery, transportation and other social services.

A program developed at the University of Colorado, for example, follows patients for the first month after their discharge, helping them manage their medications, schedule follow-up appointments and recognize signs of trouble.

San Diego County received a federal grant to improve handoffs from the hospital using an adaptation of the University of Colorado’s program. The county’s Aging and Independence Services agency partnered with four hospital systems — Scripps Health; University of California, San Diego; Palomar Health, and Sharp HealthCare — to serve more than 50,000 Medicare beneficiaries at the highest risk of medical complications after discharge.

The efforts aim to improve care and save money. Poorly managed transitions can waste medical services and increase health care costs. The federal government has estimated that nearly 20 percent of Medicare patients return to the hospital within 30 days, costing more than $26 billion annually.

The penalties and programs around the country are starting to make a dent in the problems associated with poorly handled discharges, experts said. The San Diego County program saved Medicare an estimated $13.8 million over a two-year period between 2013 and 2015, primarily because of reduced hospital readmissions.

Cathy Statler visits her father, John Statler, 88, at Palomar Hospital in March. Cathy Statler said she wishes her father had experienced a smoother transition after his time in the hospital. (Heidi de Marco/KHN)

But experts are quick to note that more needs to be done. Naylor said providers can’t stop looking after patients just a month after they are discharged. “It’s not just thinking about today or tomorrow or the next 30 days,” she said. “For chronically ill, older people, what is their long-term trajectory?”

Programs like the one in San Diego County aren’t a panacea. It serves only a portion of Medicare beneficiaries, and people aren’t eligible for the help while they are in a nursing facility.

John Statler, 88, for example, returned to the emergency room at Palomar Hospital three times within the first week of his discharge to a nursing home. Statler had spent several days at the hospital after a fall left him with a severe head wound. His daughter said the hospital saved his life but didn’t then ensure that he had what he needed to recover after being discharged. In the end, he had to be readmitted.

Transition difficulties often start for elderly patients when they’re preparing to be discharged from the hospital. That’s when medical staffers quickly read a list of instructions to patients and hand them new prescriptions. Older patients may not understand what they are being told because they have dementia or are weakened and confused from their time in the hospital. Some are simply anxious to leave and not paying close attention.

“You are trying to reach them and do that education at such a critical time, but they are nowhere near cognitively ready to receive that,” said Joe Parker, lead nurse of care transitions at Palomar Health. “And we don’t have the luxury of time to wait.”

Back at home, family members and caregivers are often asked to take on medical tasks that would make “most first-year RNs shake in their boots,” said Robyn Golden, director of health and aging at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. That can lead to medication mix-ups, infections and other problems — especially since the average hospital stay has shrunk.

“People are going home sicker, quicker and they are not returning to their prior selves as quickly – if at all,” Golden said.

Adding to the potential complications is the fact that primary care doctors are often unaware their elderly patients are in the hospital, so they can’t step in to ensure treatment plans are followed.

The main issue the San Diego program is designed to address is the disconnect between hospitals and social services agencies, which have traditionally operated in separate silos, San Diego County and hospital officials said.

“There is a point where the hospital can’t do any more” for patients who have been discharged, said Cecile Davis, coordinator of the remote patient monitoring for Sharp HealthCare. “The key is to know when to turn them over to the community.”

To figure out what patients like Alton Rodgers need, nurses and social workers ask critical questions, said Carol Castillon, who manages the care transitions program for the county.

Do they have transportation to get to the doctor? Do they understand their medications? Do they need an in-home caregiver?

The over-arching question, Castillon said, is: “What are the long-term services we can bring in so that this person isn’t coming back to the hospital?”

Castillon said that before starting the project with the hospitals, the county regularly found older people in their homes who had been recently discharged and were unable to care for themselves. “They were sick, they were unable to get medications, they didn’t have food,” she said.

Participating hospitals identify patients for the program before they are discharged.

At Palomar Hospital one spring day, nurses Patrice Gadd and Rachel Ricchio stood at the bedside of 88-year-old Joseph Taylor, a former physical therapist who had come to the hospital with pneumonia and was diagnosed with congestive heart failure.

Gadd told him that he could get a home visit and a month of follow-up to help keep him out of the hospital. Taylor and his wife, who had recently moved from Colorado, both agreed that any help would be welcome.

Gadd urged Taylor to call the doctor if he started feeling sick again. “The problem is that the older we get, the less reserves we have in our gas tank,” she said. Things “can go south really, really quickly.”

Nearly three months after his hospitalization, however, Taylor hadn’t returned to the hospital.

This story was reported while its author, Anna Gorman, participated in a fellowship supported by New America Media, the Gerontological Society of America and The Commonwealth Fund.

]]>https://ecaring.com/kaiser-health-news-highlights-need-for-better-care-transitions-that-ecaring-can-provide/feed/0https://ecaring.com/kaiser-health-news-highlights-need-for-better-care-transitions-that-ecaring-can-provide/d.health Summit 2016 Innovation Spotlight: eCaring for Aging Americans in the Homehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ecaring/~3/E9ryXlU1znY/
https://ecaring.com/d-health-summit-2016-innovation-spotlight-ecaring-for-aging-americans-in-the-home/#commentsThu, 28 Jul 2016 14:55:09 +0000http://ecaring.com/?p=4433eCaring unique cloud-based system integrates significant behavioral, clinical and medication adherence data to manage and monitor seniors and people with chronic conditions. That information is filtered for care managers and providers, hospitals and health plans, generating actionable alerts that enable timely interventions which keep small problems in the home from leading to big ones in […]

]]>eCaring unique cloud-based system integrates significant behavioral, clinical and medication adherence data to manage and monitor seniors and people with chronic conditions. That information is filtered for care managers and providers, hospitals and health plans, generating actionable alerts that enable timely interventions which keep small problems in the home from leading to big ones in the hospital.

]]>https://ecaring.com/d-health-summit-2016-innovation-spotlight-ecaring-for-aging-americans-in-the-home/feed/0https://ecaring.com/d-health-summit-2016-innovation-spotlight-ecaring-for-aging-americans-in-the-home/eCaring: An Essential Tool for Value Based Digital Care Management Part IIhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ecaring/~3/BTNmGjg10Vo/
https://ecaring.com/ecaring-an-essential-tool-for-value-based-digital-care-management-part-ii/#commentsWed, 29 Jun 2016 15:19:33 +0000http://ecaring.com/?p=4429A “value-based digital health” reimbursement model as a plausible payment solution for new technology appeared in the 2016 McKinsey Report How Healthcare Systems Can Become Digital-Health Leaders by Gerardo Aue. The concept advocates that since health systems hold the data needed to measure outcomes, why not use this information to measure the outcomes of digital […]

]]>A “value-based digital health” reimbursement model as a plausible payment solution for new technology appeared in the 2016 McKinsey ReportHow Healthcare Systems Can Become Digital-Health Leaders by Gerardo Aue. The concept advocates that since health systems hold the data needed to measure outcomes, why not use this information to measure the outcomes of digital health services? If cost reductions or quality improvements can be found in the data, the benefits can be shared with the digital health solution providers.

In a conversation with Robert Herzog, CEO and Founder of eCaring, a highly acclaimed a cloud-based home healthcare technology, I asked him to share his thoughts on the subject. He commented, “I think we are an essential tool for a dual payment model such as value-based care payments. If you think about what people say is driving the goals of changing the health care system in this country, there are two main areas, one is utilization. You want to reduce hospital admissions, hospital readmissions, and emergency room visits; and to a lesser extent, skilled nursing home visits could be expensive. Home care can be equally effective and less expensive. The second part, you want to improve the patient experience. You want to give patients a greater level of satisfaction and increased engagement because those things tend to lead to better health outcomes for patients.”

Having had a really good experience in cutting readmissions rates by 60% for a large hospital in New York, Herzog believes you can really make these things better. Bundled payment programs, fixed procedure costs, post procedure capitated rates and value bases payments, would all work much better, if you get good information from the patient. Under today’s new alternate payment schemes, organizations must achieve better outcomes to get a better level of reimbursement. As an added burden, hospitals are faced with readmission penalties when people come in at a higher than the average rate for something like congestive heart failure. “Without digital health, you are flying blind, where most of the serious events which lead to the greatest costs and the worst outcomes. So I completely agree that all the new alternative pay models goals and objectives of changing healthcare need information from the home. And until now, without eCaring, most of that information has been extremely limited,” maintains Herzog.

eCaring has worked very closely with large healthcare insurance companies in the New York area, many with over a million members, on their managed long-term care plans and Medicare Advantage populations. The collaborative results have been remarkable. A comparative cost analysis study was conducted by a selected health insurance company. The intervention “test” group used the eCaring platform benchmarked against a control group in the same population of dually eligible Medicare and Medicaid recipients. The analysis indicated, on an annualized basis, $6000 per member per year using eCaring, which is about 15% of the total cost of care. “This is a really significant number, and I don’t think anybody else really comes close to that. There are 9 million dual eligibles in the US of Medicare-Medicaid recipients, with the potential impact of bending the cost curve on 3 trillion dollar health care economy in the US. This is a way we can approach care in a meaningful way. There are tens of millions people with multiple chronic conditions in Medicare and Medicaid and some in commercial insurance. And we had good results with this payer, we had good results with health care plans, home health agencies and hospitals in reducing utilization of the hospital and also getting these better outcomes overall with lower expenses for these patients,” Herzog voiced in triumph.

Early in-home interventions with the eCaring digital heath platform have contributed to a 30 % to 40% reduction in hospitals admissions or readmissions. If an eCaring monitored patient is admitted to the hospital the likelihood is great the problem was caught early and mostly likely the event will turn out less severe. Data has shown the average length of stay is more than 50% shorter for hospitalized patients using eCaring than for those without it. Consider the substantial cost savings as well. Hospital visit expenditures for a regular member of the plan are $13,000 whereas, the average cost with is $10,000. Data also show that when eCaring patients leave the hospital they go back less frequently. eCaring can take credit for the key difference because you are getting much better information exchanged from patient and caregiver.

Right now, there isn’t a good way to get comprehensive information post discharge. Questions about whether the patient got their medications and is taking them, had vital signs taken in and out of the home, is adhering to the plan of care, keeps their appointments, plus sleeps, eats or drinks properly. All these things are crucial to understanding the patient’s condition at home and helps prevents them from going back to the hospital. “Through that, we get these great results across the continuum of care. Our motto is to best deal with the healthcare crisis is to avoid it in the first place, ” said Herzog in closing.

Founded on personal experience, eCaring keeps people at home and out of the hospital every day. Mr. Herzog shared with me the decline and eventual demise of his own mother. In the late 1990s, his mother first started getting ill. She had worked until she was 79 years old in a law firm. Upon retirement, she had a few good years, and then some not so good years….

“Those years proved to be very difficult for myself and my family, as she increasingly had needs for home care and healthcare services. And often some of those services contributed to her further need for services. What I learned in that process was that what you don’t know can hurt you. For example, we would turn the house keys from mom’s house over to strangers, very well meaning strangers. In her mid –eighties my Jewish mother learned to eat jerk chicken with one of her homecare workers, but none the less it was a real struggle. There was no good way to get information out of the home. My mother’s first hospitalization occurred because she was hallucinating, which was pretty shocking for everybody. My mother was better at math than I was, a very, very sharp woman. It turned out she was hallucinating because she had a urinary tract infection. She had a UTI because she was dehydrated. She was dehydrated because she wasn’t drinking water. And that was because she was a very proud woman starting to have trouble going to the bathroom on her own and wouldn’t tell anybody. So in our eCaring system, you have the ability to communicate if somebody is not drinking water. And had I had that system in place at the time of my mother’s home care, it would have saved us countless visits in and out of hospitals and rehab, a downward spiral that occurred because of that, tens of thousands of dollars of expenses, and all the burdens and stresses of those kinds of events. Definitely in retrospect, it was very clear to me it was very badly managed system in terms of getting good useful information out of the home in a timely fashion.” – Robert M. Herzog, CEO eCaring

]]>https://ecaring.com/ecaring-an-essential-tool-for-value-based-digital-care-management-part-ii/feed/0https://ecaring.com/ecaring-an-essential-tool-for-value-based-digital-care-management-part-ii/eCaring: Bending the Cost Curve with Big Data for Home-Based Patientshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ecaring/~3/iU6aMLw4ToI/
https://ecaring.com/ecaring-bending-the-cost-curve-with-big-data-for-home-based-patients/#commentsTue, 28 Jun 2016 15:21:00 +0000http://ecaring.com/?p=4426By Sarianne Gruber “There are a lot of tech savvy people making apps for tech-savvy people. It’s a wonderful world that we live in with the ability to do that, but we are not going to bend the cost curve in the United States by providing an app for an otherwise healthy forty-year-old person with […]

“There are a lot of tech savvy people making apps for tech-savvy people. It’s a wonderful world that we live in with the ability to do that, but we are not going to bend the cost curve in the United States by providing an app for an otherwise healthy forty-year-old person with diabetes or for the sixty-year-old that has a heart condition who is out on the golf course. If you really are going to bend that curve, you have to address the cost of the neediest and vulnerable members of our population. There is a lot of stuff going on in healthcare that is all great if you have a smart phone and can use it, but the costliest, neediest users in the system are the underserved and low income. They don’t have Wi-Fi or broadband in the home. They are the people who benefit most from the digital tools that can be made available and can provide more intensive personal care,” conveyed Robert Herzog, CEO of eCaring.

About three years ago at a Health 2.0 NYC meetup, I saw a wireframe presentation of the eCaring’s patient monitoring system and was extremely impressed with the simplistic and intuitive approach to collecting data. His company’s digital platform has become the basis for getting good information out of the home and perhaps, more importantly, introducing good information into the home. I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Herzog and learn how the eCaring system is breaking barriers for in-home patients and their caregivers.

Robert Herzog has a deep compassion for the neediest recipients of health services, often very underserved in terms of their access to new tools and digital resources. Having received a grant in 2014 from the New York Economic Corporation, they worked together with Pace University to alleviate patient diversity issues. Systems were installed in the homes of frail independent seniors living in public housing residences within Manhattan’s Lower Eastside. Most of the recipients were native Chinese or Spanish speaking, however, language constraints were not a concern for these eCaring users. Mr. Herzog described the universality of the interface as “icons” that pictorially depict a condition or behavior whether patients are eating, how they are sleeping or whether they are taking their medications as well as the ability to monitor vital signs. “But to the extent that people like additional information, eCaring has a help text which people can use in their native languages like Chinese, Russian, French, Spanish or Thigala, making it an easy introduction to using this as possible,” added Herzog.

Just a year ago eCaring established partnerships with Samsung and Verizon since many of their low-income patients don’t have internet access in their homes. Working with Samsung has lead to the creation of customized care plans for populations and individuals. Depending on the engaged care management organization, Samsung prepares “lock down ready to go tablets” for each home and Verizon provides low-cost data plans. The ability to put a tablet with connectivity in the homes of people who otherwise do not have internet connection opens up a whole world of opportunities to patients and their providers.

eCaring creates a plan of care or service plan that the homecare worker sees in the patient’s home and the information that needs to be entered. Any piece of information, data point or observation can be connected to an alert that says “pay attention now”. It may be a vital sign that is out of range or maybe a state of confusion, slurred speech or a change in bodily functions such as constipation or a bloody stool. All these things happen to people can occur at home over a period of time. New triggers for alerts are customizable by population, condition of disease and for the individual. The data helps you track if patients are adhering to the care plan, keeping their appointments as well as sleeping, eating and drinking regularly.

All these things are crucial to understanding the patient’s condition and helps prevent them from going back into the hospital. Technically, all results across the continuum of care get entered and go through the cellular data network up into the cloud in real time. Care managers can then view all information that resides on an extensive database. “We generate between 500 and 8,000 data points per patient per month on average for the people who are using it. That’s a lot of data! So we don’t want to overwhelm people. Care managers are already overwhelmed, and again we want to be practical with what fits into their workflow,” Herzog pointed out.

What makes eCaring unique is its starting point – the homecare worker, patient and family caregiver. Having witnessed his ill, retired mother take a “downward spiral” because the patient-caregiver information was not exchangeable, Herzog took his entrepreneurial skills of 30 years coupled with a pioneer spirit for technology to find a way to close this gap. “With that approach in mind, it was designed for people like you and me, taking care of mom and dad. There weren’t tablets; there weren’t smart phones in any way so we used PCs in the home. Training homecare workers on this unique system in order to get information and worked really well,” recounted Herzog. When the Accountable Care Act came about, industry trends, regulations, and mandates focusing on Managed Care became important. Herzog saw an opportunity to take what they originally designed for individual families and use it with enterprises. Upon making the switch, they started focusing on enterprise solutions and managing care for large populations.

Today the eCaring mantra is “practicality”, which is the reason why so many agencies, healthcare workers, and unions have used the product. Designed to be a simple, intuitive and easy system to use for people who will use it the most, not just the homecare worker, but the care manager may also be receiving this information. In this way, a rapid respond from all parties enables early intervention to keep people in their homes. “And we had really good success with that. I know a lot of the people are not losing sleep at night if only I can get good health data in the home because that is the part that they don’t know it exists. It’s a great opportunity for me today to let people know that there is a new source of big healthcare data out in the world. We generate extensive information and we also filter it very finely in a very usable format for people who can make good use of it. That information has a great impact on reducing hospital use ER visits readmissions, cutting costs and generating better outcomes and greater levels of patient satisfaction,” he triumphantly shared.

Learn more about Robert M. Herzog and eCaring , please click here to connect the website.

]]>https://ecaring.com/ecaring-bending-the-cost-curve-with-big-data-for-home-based-patients/feed/0https://ecaring.com/ecaring-bending-the-cost-curve-with-big-data-for-home-based-patients/Featured in the New York Observer: eCaring Tracks the Health of Your Aging Mom and Dadhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ecaring/~3/t-xGbOwN2p8/
https://ecaring.com/featured-in-the-new-york-observer-ecaring-tracks-the-health-of-your-aging-mom-and-dad-2/#commentsMon, 09 May 2016 15:52:13 +0000http://ecaring.com/?p=4405Home health care has become a $38 billion industry in America, largely because of the increased needs of baby boomers—about 10,000 boomers turn 65 each dayand 3.3 million older Americans receive home health care from one of 12,400 home health care agencies.